So how many of you have had problems with the off-screen buttons in MyTobii?
Well I, at least, have to admit that I’m one of them.
If you don’t know what the off-screen buttons are, I’m sure you are not alone. Though powerful, these are unfortunately not the most intuitive feature of our MyTobii software.

Off-screen buttons are buttons that you can gaze upon outside of your screen and still activate functionality in MyTobii. The button that most people use is the off-screen button below your screen. This brings up the System menu containing the Pause and Settings buttons. There is also an off-screen button if you gaze to the left of the screen. This is only available when you control the mouse pointer, either through the Windows Control or in the Web browser. This button will bring up the Mouse Control menu.

Our users have encountered several problems with these off-screen menus:
A) They are not easily brought into view
B) They pop up all the time even when you do not want them to
C) They are unintuitive and can be hard to understand for some users

For A) there is always a trade-off between ease of access and bringing up the menus accidentally. If the off-screen buttons are to big they are much easily brought up accidentally. If they are small they will be too hard to bring up. The MyTobii 2.4 release have had the size and positions of these buttons adjusted, so hopefully the menus are brought up more easily but at the same time not to easy to avoid B).

There are a few solution for B). For some users the off-screen buttons will bring up the menus constantly because of how their eyes work.
This could be very confusing for some of the users and also very distracting especially in a try-out situation. Fortunately there are actually options to turn off the pop-ups. This is done in Advance Settings. To turn off the System menu pop-up, just go to the System node in Advanced Settings and tick the checkbox named “Disable system menu popup”. If you want to disable the mouse menu popup there is a similar option on the Mouse node in Advanced settings. The checkbox is named “Disable mouse menu popup”. These settings are only recommended at try-out situations since users will have a hard time pausing or come back from the Windows Control once these menus are disabled. If you don’t want to be as drastic as to turn off these menus, there is the option to set a higher dwell time on these off-screen buttons. By default the menus are brought up directly as soon as you even as glance on the buttons. But you could set the dwell time on these buttons to be a little longer. This might make them less distracting and annoying for some users, while maintaining the possibility of them bringing them up. The dwell settings are located at the same location as the disable checkboxes mentioned above. I.e. in the System and Mouse nodes of Advanced Settings.

Now for C)… this is something we will be working on, how to make off-screen buttons more intuitive and understandable. There are probably a lot of ways we could make this better, but we don’t want to rush into anything. In the meanwhile you could actually make it more understandable by putting physical items on the side of the screens. This makes it a little more intuitive since users will actually have to look at something to activate the menus and not just stare at empty air. On our D10 product, you could for example attach magnetic icons on the screen frame. So to activate the menus they just have to look at the icons. I guess you have other ideas on how you can attach physical objects on your P10, so why don’t you share them in our Forum?

Well that’s all for this month. Next month I will have some tips of how you can use User Profiles.
Cheers!